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Category: Bipolar 1 Disorder

Ain’t easy. Especially on low sleep. I recently stumbled upon some literature describing the relationship between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system. Specifically it went over the connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdalae. Will have to come back here & post the link(s) but wanted to jot this down here, as it’s timely & highly relevant to mood disorders.

Sleep is a fickle thing & it seems that quality and duration of sleep is related to one’s ability to keep their amygdala functioning well. The absence of good quality sleep of proper duration can lead one to experience impulsiveness, out-of-control distractibility and responsiveness to irrelevant stimuli, and immense irritability. Take it from me: the vast gulf between being contented & calm or being a murderous monster can be crossed, in part, by hitting the hay.

And no, I don’t mean N-Acetyl Cysteine. I’m talking about the nucleus accumbens. This devilish bit of brain tissue is one that seeks for its larger meat-sack the experience of reward and short-term pleasure. To be honest the NAC isn’t the only zone related to that tendency: the frontal striatum and a few other areas are instrumental as well. To finally reach the end of the fall semester a bit bruised and battered reveals to me that my own proclivity for pressuring pleasure to pop up in the present is pretty problematic.

So the quest now is to develop skills and habits that enable the delay of gratification. In order to conduct this oversized ganglion through larger and longer movements I’ll be getting in touch with some professionals in the area who focus on this issue specifically. How exciting! Will post updates as that moves along. Here’s some soul food for any of you mind-wanderers wondering what to read about to get a sense of the issue.

One way to really waste your time is reading on and on about mindfulness. And there is surely no end of long long long books books books offering a thousand lifetimes’ worth of answers about mindfulness. Complex, marketable, secular answers. Let’s set those answers and those long books on the shelf for now. When I was 18 years old, a scientist in Madison posed a question in the first half of a brief article. That question was Are questionnaire-based self-reports of mindfulness valid?

Now I’m 25 years old. Unresolved is ‘the questionnaire question’, but absolutely certain to me this morning was my own mindlessness. Here’s a small sample of the day’s distractions, brought to you from first-semester chemistry (via self report…validity to be determined):

11:15am Distracted by goal-flavored thoughts about writing a memoir of high quality, visualizing the steps associated with such a venture

11:15:30am Writing-thoughts bubbling up to account for the possibility or inevitability of memoir-thoughts

11:19am Anger-thoughts about institutional life, hot heated word-thoughts offering critiques of abusive power structures and their creations, which stemmed from thoughts about writing

11:24am What’s the best way to steal a lot of stuff from Whole Foods?

11:26am Anger-Argue thoughts about my old job, and the gross inability of my former boss to do her job (or live her live generally)

My intent for that 15-minute period was to simply write those thoughts that were most distracting for me. So when I noticed that my attention was unstable even for a moment, or that my mind’s eye had been occluded by some material other than coursework, I wrote down that material non-judgmentally and as it presented itself. It can be hugely valuable to understand and observe our consciousness without responding to or agreeing/disagreeing with it.

Write, but don’t write aimlessly. Don’t. Write. Aimlessly. This is not time to let loose with the pen & paper (or keyboard), or to journal about your fucking feelings, or to think up how you haven’t thought up anything yet. This is time to get regular. Write at scheduled times each day: within a few minutes after waking up, after meals, before bed.There are two genres of writing you must commit to in order to go from a state of gloomy nothingness to one of healthy motivation.5a) Write down the time you wake up (to the minute: e.g. what time exactly you stand up), what you eat/drink/ingest/intoxicate yourself with, what medications you take, and the forms of exercise you get. Writing these down each day will give you the first clear and undeniable suggestion of any bullshit you’ve been allowing yourself to get up to: sleeping in, enjoying 4 boxes of Milk Duds for breakfast several days a week, etc.
5b) Write about your most extreme moods and prevalent thoughts. Don’t write whatever the fuck you want about them, though: don’t write aimlessly. When you write about your most extreme moods and prevalent thoughts do so in a detached way, with your intent being only to offer a memorable record to a future version of you who will be reading your day’s notes. Write about how the mood or thought came on, the content of your conscious awareness during that time, and any other relevant information. Then stop writing. Though unrewarding in the moment and tedious (combined with the genre you’ve already mastered in part 5a it will seem like you are just churning out streams of data) this style of bookkeeping will eventually form a long list of your experiences during your shittiest moments.You now have 2 small books about yourself. The first small book (writing style described in 5a), for those of us who frequently stray from our regular schedule and needs, can offer a simple and brutally honest assessment of one’s daily habits, and therefore the first steps on a route to a more motivated state of being. But when all systems are go and the vehicle is still stuck, meaning that one’s lifestyle is relatively clean but one’s outlook is still relatively filthy, the second small book (writing style described in 5b) becomes more valuable. This description of extreme experiences will offer the second, third, fourth, and fifth steps on a route towards a more specific understanding of the barriers to a more motivated state of being.

It is extremely important for depressed people to become Writers of these two documents and to also review their writings daily. These ever-growing documents will give you your one and only chance to more simply articulate your patterns of being and find the weak points at which to strike remaining controllable causes of your depressed mood. Should you choose to sit there and word-vomit with your writing during a depressive phase that is up to you. As for me, the mere sight and smell of my acidic unfiltered feelings spilling onto the floor, only to dry out and be-revisited over and over, doesn’t do much good. You can make your writing fun and creative in other ways: keep a journal for writing type 5a, and a separate journal for writing type 5b. Type them up into cute .pdfs and see if the extreme moods correlate with any lifestyle habits. Go buy yourself a trophy when you discover the basics. Use a special pen to write about your gloomy thoughts. Throw some stickers on that shit. Whatever floats your boat.

Laugh ten times a day. No subject is off limits, just get yourself an ab workout via the giggles.

Chill

Meditate with supervision. Real-life human supervision.

You’ve gotten this far and still feel shitty, so let me ask you this: have you told anyone that your ball has stopped rolling? Find someone to give you a push.

**the suggested application of these tactics comes with the assumption that you are under regular supervision and treatment by a competent psychiatric care professional who can write prescriptions. if you aren’t doing that there’s a good reason you still feel shitty.